Tallapaka Annamacharya

Annamayya was born in 1408 at Tallapaka in the Kadapa country to Narayana Suri and Lakkamamba. The family tradition holds that he was born of the grace of Shri Venkateshwara as the amsha of Nandaka, the Lord's sword. At sixteen, the story goes, he left home without a word and walked up the hills of Tirumala, singing as he climbed, and there he received Vaishnava initiation. From that day the Lord of the Seven Hills was the subject of everything he sang.

He vowed to compose a song for Venkateshwara every day. The tradition counts thirty-two thousand sankirtanas. His son Peda Tirumalacharya and grandson Chinna Tirumalacharya had them engraved on copper plates, which were stored in a small vault in the Tirumala temple and forgotten. In 1922 the vault was opened and about thirteen thousand songs came out; the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams has published them ever since. That is why so much of what we sing of Annamayya was heard again only in the last century.

His songs are of two kinds: adhyatma, on the soul and the Lord, and sringara, the love of the Lord and his consort. He wrote in plain, spoken Telugu and is called Pada-kavita Pitamaha, the grandfather of the song-poem. Brahmam Okkate says that the king and the servant sleep on the same earth and the Brahman is one for all. The tradition says that when the Saluva king demanded that he sing of him, Annamayya refused and was chained; he sang to the Lord, and the chains fell.